David Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, admitted that “Few drugs are as dangerous as the opioids.” This is clearly the case when you consider that 2.5 million Americans struggle with an opioid use disorder and 33,092 Americans died from an opioid-related overdose in 2015. These dangerous medications are still being prescribed to innumerable patients with dangerous results. How did this drug crisis happen?
Opioids have been used for their euphoric and pain relieving effects for thousands of years. Derived from the opium poppy, opioids attach to receptors in the brain to block pain, slow down breathing and relax certain muscles in the body. One of the first prescription opioids was heroin which was made by the Bayer Company in 1898 as a cough suppressant. It became illegal in 1924 due to its highly addictive qualities.Percocet and Vicodin began being prescribed to patients in the mid and late 1990’s and Purdue Pharma put OxyContin on the market in 1996 as a long-term painkiller to help those with chronic pain manage this condition for an extended period. With these new medications available, the number of opioid prescriptions jumped by 8 million between the years 1995 to 1996. In recent years, both President Obama and President Trump announced that our country is facing an “opium epidemic” and that it is causing a “public health emergency.” In fact, “overdoses, fueled by opioids, are the leading cause of death for Americans under 50 years old — killing roughly 64,000 people last year, more than guns or car accidents,” reported The New York Times.
While opioid medications are prescribed in many cases to treat chronic pain (which is pain that lasts longer than one month), scientists are finding out that in fact it is having the opposite result. In a report published by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, doctors stated that, “some patients will experience worsening of their pain in the face of dose escalation... some of these patients are not experiencing more pain because of changes related to… a progression of a tissue-injuring process, but rather, may be manifesting an increase in pain as a result of the opioid-induced neurophysiological changes.” This means that patients can become more sensitive to pain which can lead to a higher dosage of the medication being prescribed.Furthermore, this is a uniquely American problem. Did you know that Americans represent only 5% of the world’s population and yet they consume 80% of the world’s manufactured opioid medications? Opioids are efficient when it comes to acute pain, but many times they are misused and overused when it comes to chronic pain; this could very well play a large role in the current opioid epidemic. “More than one in four patients become dependent physically and psychologically after relatively brief spans of use at prescribed doses [of opioids] (as little as several weeks),” explains Dr. Walter Ling. This causes doctors to use “opioids thereafter not so much to treat their pain [but to] ease their suffering.”
